Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Bureaucracy But Were Afraid to Ask by T R Raghunandan

Author:T R Raghunandan [Raghunandan, T.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353056209
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

8

Problem-Solving, Technology and the IAS

Over the years, the earlier character of the IAS officer as a wordsmith, educated well in the liberal arts, has been replaced by that of a techno-manager—somewhat inarticulate when compared with the earlier generation, but a whiz in automation, IT and communication technology. However, since the IAS spans at least two generations of officers, the system has to accommodate the styles and priorities of the wordsmith chief secretary and the tech-savvy but relatively inarticulate subcollector. In between are various hybrids. You find some oldies who have desperately attempted to keep pace with changing times, usually equipped with state-of-the-art mobile phones being utilized to about 5 per cent of their capabilities and who are well educated through WhatsApp forwards and YouTube with some of the latest that technology has to offer. You also find others who stubbornly cling to the old ways, who dictate their letters to stenographers—animals that will be kept alive for at least the next two decades by government efforts alone. Because of the glacial speed with which government works anyway, paradoxically, the latter seem to get as much work done as those with the latest mobile phones.

I confess to being something of a hybrid myself. At one stage, I might have counted myself as an innovator in technology and process re-engineering, but if I were in the government today, I would provide sanctuary for stenographers.

Yet, I must count myself lucky for having worked for the better part of my career in Karnataka, which has had a long history of innovation in the digital sphere. The state established a government computer centre in the early seventies and has since then spearheaded several reforms in governance, using the possibilities of e-governance. The Karnataka Government Computer Centre was a mysterious place in the eighties. It filled one with pride to walk through the centre in those early days, with their whirring mainframe computers maintained in sterile, air-conditioned environments.

Yet, one thing remains constant: the Karnataka government does not seem to have made any significant improvement in its responsiveness to people. True, certain things have dramatically changed, such as the accessibility and availability of land records, but in other ways, the state remains as non-transparent as it used to be. This ought not to be construed as a criticism of Karnataka’s government, which is probably much better off than other states’. Yet, this dichotomy lingers within the government, of a certain indifference and unresponsiveness that continues in spite of remarkable successes in streamlining certain self-contained processes. Indeed, Karnataka could be an excellent case study of this kind of widespread schizophrenia that affects other governments too.

Why is it, that in spite of measures to streamline government processes through e-governance, the government is still seen as being forbidding and non-transparent? Why does the government live in parallel worlds, nay, centuries? Why do some people in the government dazzle us with visions of a cashless, paperless future in which we breeze through life with nary a thought to the burdens of

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